Against Such Odds

By A.C.S. Bird

Review of When Your Sky Runs Into Mine by Rooja Mohassessy (USA: Elixir Press, 2023)

Bahman Mohassess - Danaë (1978), Oil on Canvas
Image description: An abstract figure resembling a nude human is portrayed horizontally across the canvas, against a purple and black backdrop. The figure’s limbs are exaggeratedly muscular; their face and the front of their torso are turned away from us. Their right arm is bent to their chest and their right hand is clenched into a fist; their left hand is placed between their thighs. A yellow and orange ray extends from their thigh towards the upper edge of the painting.

Mohassesssy’s poems yield up their treasures bit by bit, prolonging the pleasure of first encounters. I met the poet and her poetry in March of 2023 at the Seattle conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. In the wake of the conference, I read the volume nearly straight through, in contrast to my usual approach to poetry. Repeated returns to it over the course of a year offered ever deeper appreciation for Mohassessy’s work but no reassurance of having plumbed its depths. A degree of artistic opacity is appropriate to a volume in which concealment and revelation are, if not dominant, at least recurrent themes.

The arrangement of the collection is roughly chronological, though the poems don’t represent a continuous narrative; most were previously published elsewhere. Part I selections are set in Iran, many invoking the 1979 Islamic revolution or the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq war. Coming-of-age and liminal states dominate Part II, i.e., “At Twelve,” “Like a Rosebud,” “First Kiss,” “The Immigrant and Skin,” “The Immigrant and Envy,” “The Immigrant and Lament.” Part III reflects a more settled situation, with titles such as “Interview for Asylum” and “Native.” The poems of Part IV deal with aging parents and a return to themes of ancestry and identity. But the sense of sojourning lingers throughout. “Sanctions,” in Part III, opens with, “Mr. President T., / I’m you’re Iranian.” Ruminations on the stockpiling of nuclear weapons and the paralyzing effects of economic sanctions are followed with the ironic lines, “Perhaps it’s best then for you / to starve some of my people.”

Bahman Mohassess - Untitled (2010), Collagework
Image description: A tall figure is depicted against a grayish-white background. The figure wears a gray chador. At the bottom right, the figure’s shadow is sketched out in discernible gray strokes.

Although the poet continues to identify with the country of her birth, her “we” has a global reach. “Eggplants” conjures the vegetable’s international counterparts, hailing from Iran, Japan, Italy, Thailand, and France, while the narrator regards the Black Beauties in her California garden. In “Shopping” the poet contemplates the unseen impact her purchases have on the Earth, as well as its inhabitants. And “This Used to be the Sea. One Day We Looked Out, We Couldn’t See the Sea” concerns itself with a garbage crisis in Lebanon, ongoing at the time in writing in 2018.

Stranger and global citizen both constitute an identity. But they also accord with the oft-invoked sense of being alienated from oneself. Near the heart of the volume appears the poem “All About Me.” When a French teacher asks a pupil to tell about herself, he is met with silence. In childhood much of our sense of self stems not from achievements or social status but from identification with familiar people and places. Estranged from these, “my feline soul” of the poem is at a loss to sum up her self for companions who can’t begin to conceive of her origins. In the wake of the teacher’s question, she chews on her Swiss fountain pen and then scribbles, “je ne sais pas qui je suis” (“I don’t know who I am”).

More than displacement, however, accounts for the speaker’s alienation. Situated at the end of Part I, “Childhood” summons the implements and effects of war—bullets, shards, holes in the walls of her home. The consequence: “Frightened, my childhood refused / to attend my life.” In the wake of shock and pain, the child resorts to self-deception to survive. “I blew on its sore eyes, / resorted to lies.” Bifurcated, she is divorced from the passage of life that is not only the birthright of every human but the essential foundation of all that follows.

Reference to veiling is almost inevitable in a discussion of the feminine in Iran. Like trauma, the chador conceals the subject, not merely from others, but from herself. In “Hijab in Third Grade,” Mohassessy and her mother shop for a school uniform, which includes a veil. An education should enlighten, but here the chador cloaks the girl in midnight. It stifles the starlight of her hair; its knotted ends are a lock beneath her chin. Foreboding suffuses the ominous lines, “It’s time to come to terms / with the dark.”

The imagery of a lock connotes not only concealment but containment. The title of the poem “Death Was Like a Desire” is a quote from a woman incarcerated in Tehran’s notoriously brutal Evin prison. An Iranian friend once told us that if they don’t kill you at Evin, they make you wish you were dead. Here the veil signals the supposedly shameful nature of the woman within.

… They said a bare square
inch of our calves, our song, called for repentance. And so
they defiled us at night since, they said, we were already dirty.

Imposed, the veil is an inescapable pall, weighting down the wearer and “denying us access into yet one more room.” One could conclude that the barred room represents access to God. But the poem suggests that, prior to the veiling edict, religious rituals served as gentle reminders to look to God for mercy.

Bahman Mohassess - Untitled (2010), Collagework
Image description: A human figure with a slight slouch wears a black coat and white headdress. She walks uphill on a tiled ground. In the background, a worn-out brick wall is interrupted by windows; abstract figures resembling portrait paintings, as well as sunflowers, are visible from the windows. 

Such a scenario prevails in “Intoxicated by Verses,” where a child kneels over the embossed pages of the Quran. Absorbed in study, her cupped hands are “an invitation for God to join her.” The atmosphere of bliss that suffuses the lines is augmented by her white chador, “sunny with daisies” and the imagined “birds of praise” that “come cooing, darting out and into her chador.” Elsewhere, too, the chador signals piety rather than oppression. In “Ramazan in Tajrish” and “Madar,” the grandmother’s chador subsumes both nature imagery and the spirit of the devoted woman. At the end of a day of fasting, the veil

… shifted faithfully
about you, sprinkled with flowers, deferential
with the remaining minutes.

When the grandmother traverses the streets to visit her granddaughter, the veil is a collection of autumn leaves. Its folds rustle about her feet, and its hues mirror the ancient limbs of the gnarled sycamores overhead. Mohassessy’s grandmother is no despot insisting on external religious conformity. Rather, she exudes warmth and affection. During Ramazan she complies with her ten-year-old granddaughter’s relentless demands to be awakened to observe the custom of pre-dawn breakfast. “Ramazan in Tajrish” is perhaps my favorite poem, for the intimacy it evokes between Mohassessy and her grandmother in an act of voluntary devotion.

Mohassessy’s poems depict two sorts of imposed silences—metaphorical ones imposed by governments or individuals, and the literal silence experienced by her hearing-impaired parents. In “War” Mohassessy describes how the conflict with Iraq disrupted lives, drained the economy, and dragged on for eight long years. The deaf, she reports, could hear neither the mullahs’ propaganda nor the sirens’ scream. But their newly-devised signs embodied what everyone agreed upon:

…Four fingers
held high over the brow fanned out the full
dynastic plumage of the Shah, and bobbing both hands
up and down in the air dubbed him a puppet.
Then two smacking gestures in midair for stars
and a pointed index meant America was to blame.

In “Rose D’Ispahan” Mohassessy conveys the pain and accompanying guilt of leaving home in her youth, even with her mother’s blessing.

Mother, once your little prince left, how did you haggle
for rationed coupons? Who signed the air-raid siren
into your eyes? You managed though the house no longer heard
the doorbell, could barely read or write, every room dumb,
half-open doors shutting without a sound.

“A Muslim” relates an era decades later, when the poet and her mother both reside in different U.S. cities. FaceTime chats in sign impose challenges for her mother—the MacBook Air’s English keyboard, the intricacies of single versus double taps. “We communicate with bare essentials, omit verbs / prepositions, clauses, we stick to the truth.” But the unwelcome truths her mother uncovers while fumbling about the Web pose the greatest challenge.

How, for example, to explain the 2019 Easter Sunday tragedy in Sri Lanka?

Eight Muslims wrapped each other in explosives
and blew up two hundred fifty-nine Christians
in retaliation for one Christian
who blasted fifty Muslims last month.

The daughter opts for distraction, hoping a fluffy canine lofted across the screen can divert her mother from disheartening headlines.

Bahman Mohassess - La Reveuse (2006), Collagework 
Image description: A vertical, abstract form is rendered against a dark-blue and turquoise backdrop. The top of the form is white and vaguely resembles a pointed head and a neck; the lower half of the form is brown. 

That Mohassessy’s poems resonate with familiarity for a Western reader is testimony to her artistry. But her work also percolates a prickly unease, a warning against too-quick identification. The title of the book itself accommodates contradictory interpretations. Is this a companionable “running into,” as when two friends meet by happenstance, or when watercolors merge into a wash of complementary hues? Or is it a hostile collision? The irony that rings through the eponymous poem suggests the latter. In the persona of a Westerner, “When Your Sky Runs Into Mine” describes the patronizing detachment with which the immigrant will be received. Her devastating losses meet with cool questioning and polite condescension. “In mixed company, / I’ll commend your tongue / on how well it speaks my tongue.” When the roles are reversed, the Westerner transports the same superior stance abroad:

When I visit your country
I’ll carry a trifle of your words
to use in fair trade. I’ll express myself
with a generous tip and thank you
and yours for civilizing your children
not to stare and for sterilizing
the countertops for my intestinal flora.

In another cross-cultural encounter, “Mrs. Farahmand and Mrs. Henderson Share Drinks on the Eve of War,” an Iranian entertains an acquaintance in her home. They stick to superficialities, skirting hazardous subjects with polite discomfiture. At length, eased by a cocktail or two, they settle in to more intimate topics—sex and herbal remedies for menopause. In the waning light of sunset, Mohassessy envisages the spirits of her neighbor’s ancestors mingling “shoulder to shoulder with mine / all on the same defeated side.” Like all Mohassessy’s poems, this one comes apart in layers. The shade of melancholy that permeates the piece reflects both the equalizing quality of death and the inescapable reality of centuries of war. Is it the wars that breed hostility between individuals, or the other way around? Is it ever possible to truly overcome our legacy of distrust and violence? In the final stanza a companionable air suffuses the concluding moments of the encounter. But the wry twist in the closing lines hints at only provisional success: “… Look how well we managed / against such heavy odds and shed no blood.”

Perhaps it is our encounters with others, if we are willing truly to perceive and receive, that best reveal our selves. Will we trample and encroach? Maintain a tentative reserve? Or open the door to potential painful truths about ourselves and compassionate acceptance of others? Mohassessy’s lyrical lines and charming imagery can lull an unwary reader into complacency. But like the best art, her poetry is incisive, laying bare the truth for those willing to receive it. Her collection bears revisiting and contemplation from many angles.

Bahman Mohassess - Untitled (2009), Collagework
Image description: A reddish-orange, abstract form is rendered against a maroon backdrop, with horizontal beams on the right side of the painting. The form, though rendered abstractly, resembles a figure with a hooded head. Two ovals across the middle of the form resemble eyes. 

Note: The majority of the titles in this collection are ekphrastic, inspired by the art of Mohassessy’s uncle, Bahman Mohassess (1931–2010). The paintings and the titles of the poems that accompany them appear on Mohassessy’s website at https://www.roojamohassessy.com/gallery.

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Amanda Bird is a writer and editor living outside Eugene, OR, with her husband, teen daughter, and a handful of chickens and pigeons. Her work in progress is a historical novel set in 1908 Tajikistan. She regularly posts reviews on the Story Warren website and her blog, birdsbooks.peregrines.net.

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Bahman Mohassess (1931-2010) was born in Rasht, a city by the Caspian sea. On the paternal side, he was descendent of the Moghul Dynasty and the Ghadjars from the maternal side. As a young painter, Mohassess was apprenticed to Seyyed Mohammed Habib Mohammedi. He continued his artistic education in Tehran and in Rome.  After the toppling of the Pahlavi dynasty, he lived in exile in Rome. His oeuvre comprises paintings, sculptures, and collages. He was also a celebrated translator of literary works. Many of his public works in Iran were destroyed during the Islamic Revolution, with the artist subsequently destroying many of his remaining works in Iran.

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